Media Policy, Structural Power, and Political Development at the US State-Corporate Interface

Abstract

This article illuminates an underappreciated political dimension of capitalism by elaborating media policy as a site for the dynamic interaction of corporate power and the state. Synthesizing Marxian analyses of monopoly capital, American political development (APD) perspectives on public policymaking, and communication studies conceptions of media systems as fields of democratic struggle, I trace the institutional mechanisms that enable corporate media interests to reinforce systemic imperatives and maintain political-economic dominance. I illustrate my argument with examples from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. My analysis sharpens APD’s critical edge by defining path dependency, policy feedback, and policy drift as processes through which capital leverages structural power to fend off political challenges under changing economic, social, and technological conditions. State-sanctioned ownership and control of news outlets, communication platforms, and information networks furnish a unique mechanism for influencing the structural terms of public discourse on all issues, including media policy. This implicates corporate media power in the ongoing US political communication crisis and as a central force in the entrenchment of inegalitarian and undemocratic social relations. Lending greater theoretical coherence and empirical grounding to these material and ideological dynamics historicizes public communication and highlights contingent political openings for radical engagement with media policy.

Keywords:

• Monopoly capitalism
• media policy
• political communication
• American political development
• state theory
• corporate power

Acknowledgements

Portions of the analysis in this article were presented at the 2023 Annual International Communication Association Conference. The author is particularly grateful to Dean Snyder and the journal’s manuscript reviewers for their thoughtful critiques and commentary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, J. Baxter Oliphant, and Elisa Shearer, “Misinformation and Competing Views of Reality Abounded Throughout 2020,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/02/22/misinformation-and-competing-views-of-reality-abounded-throughout-2020/ (accessed February 22, 2021); Amanda Seitz, “Newsmax Peddles an ‘Alternate Universe’ of Jan. 6 Misinformation, Report Says,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-07-19/newsmax-peddles-jan-6-insurrection-misinformation-researchers-say.

2 See, for example, Victor Pickard, Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).

3 Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

4 In broad terms, I define “capital accumulation” as augmentation of the value of private wealth through the generation of profits. From the particular perspective of monopoly capital theory, accumulation is the process by which corporate surplus is generated. In the context of my analysis, “consumption” is the acquisition and use of finished commodities (products or services) purchased through commercial transactions.

5 Rafael Khachaturian, “Bringing What State Back In? Neo-Marxism and the Origin of the Committee on States and Social Structures,” Political Research Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2019): 721–22; Joseph G. Peschek, “The Policy-Planning Network, Class Dominance, and the Challenge to Political Science,” in Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America?, eds. G. William Domhoff and Eleven Other Authors (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 105–15.

6 For lucid critical surveys of this work, see Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Bob Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In (Yet Again): Reviews, Revisions, Rejections, and Redirections,” International Review of Sociology 11, no. 2 (2001): 149–73.

7 Stephen Maher and Scott M. Aquanno, “Conceptualizing Neoliberalism: Foundations for an Institutional Marxist Theory of Capitalism,” New Political Science 40, no. 1 (2018): 41.

8 Ibid., 45.

9 Ibid., 41.

10 Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In,” 155.

11 Lee Drutman, The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017); Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 565–81; Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe, Billionaires and Stealth Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018). See also the Consortium on the American Political Economy, https://www.americanpoliticaleconomy.org/.

12 Peschek, “Policy-Planning Network,” 109–12.

13 Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17–78.

14 Suzanne Mettler and Joe Soss, “The Consequences of Public Policy for Democratic Citizenship: Bridging Policy Studies and Mass Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 1 (2004): 55–73.

15 Daniel J. Galvin and Jacob S. Hacker, “The Political Effects of Policy Drift: Policy Stalemate and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 34, no. 2 (2020): 216–38.

16 Michael Schudson, “The News Media as Political Institutions,” Annual Review of Political Science 5, no. 1 (2002): 249–69.

17 For a rare and provocative venture onto this analytical ground, see Timothy E. Cook, Governing With the News: The News Media as a Political Institution, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

18 Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2008); Justin L. Lewis, Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination (New York, NY: Wiley, 2013).

19 Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993); Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana and Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Inger L. Stole, Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s (Urbana and Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Daniel C. Hallin and Paulo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004); James Curran, Shanto Iyengar, Anker Brink Lund, and Inka Salovaara-Moring, “Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy: A Comparative Study,” European Journal of Communication 24, no. 1 (2009): 5–26; Toril Aalberg, Peter van Aelst, and James Curran, “Media Systems and the Political Information Environment: A Crossnational Comparison,” International Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 3 (2010): 255–71.

20 Hannah Holleman, Inger L. Stole, John Bellamy Foster, and Robert W. McChesney, “The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review 60, no. 11 (2009): 13.

21 Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In,” 151.

22 On the power structure approach to corporate representation in policymaking, see G. William Domhoff, “Introduction: Situating Who Rules America? Within Debates on Power” in Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America?, eds. G. William Domhoff and Eleven Other Authors (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 3–59; Barrow, Critical Theories of the State, 13–50. From 1981 through 2020, eleven of thirteen Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairs had direct positional ties to industry in media and telecommunications, finance capital and other domains. For extensive empirical evidence on lobbying, see Drutman, Business of America is Lobbying.

23 Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital.

24 Ibid., 114.

25 Ibid., 115.

26 Ibid., 122.

27 Ibid., 128.

28 Ibid., 117–21. See also Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” in Raymond Williams on Culture and Society: Essential Writings, ed. Jim McGuigan (London, UK: Sage, 2014 [1969]), 57–83.

29 John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 11 (2011): 1–39. The number of media and advertising firms in the Fortune 150 quadrupled from 1970 to 2000. Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York, NY: New Press, 2013), 121.

30 John Bellamy Foster, “Monopoly Capital at the Half-Century Mark,” Monthly Review 68, no. 3 (2016): 1–25.

31 Jerry Mander, “Privatization of Consciousness,” Monthly Review 64, no. 5 (2012): 18–41; Alvin Silk and Ernst R. Berndt, “Aggregate Advertising Expenditure in the U.S. Economy: What’s Up? Is it Real?” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 28161, 2020), 47, Figure 3, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28161/w28161.pdf; Holleman et al., “Sales Effort.”

32 Holleman et al., “Sales Effort,” 13.

33 McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy; Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy; Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2004); Eileen R. Meehan, Why TV is Not Our Fault: Television Programming, Viewers, and Who’s Really in Control (Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); McChesney, Digital Disconnect.

34 On the “irresistible rise of the state administration,” see Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London, UK: Verso Books, 1978), 217–31. See also Barrow, Critical Theories of the State, 27.

35 Drutman, Business of America is Lobbying, 155–61.

36 Ibid., 166.

37 Baran and Sweezy’s chapter on “Monopoly Capital and Race Relations” advanced a devastating critique exposing the material dimensions of structural racism in the post-war “golden age.” Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 249–80.

38 Stole, Advertising on Trial; Stole, Advertising at War; Pickard; America’s Battle for Media Democracy.

39 Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications,” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (2013): 43–64; John Bellamy Foster, “Introduction to the Second Edition of The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism,” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (2013): 107–34; Raymond Williams, “Communication Systems” in Raymond Williams on Culture and Society: Essential Writings, ed. Jim McGuigan (London: Sage, 2014 [1962]); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964).

40 Foster, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” 114–15.

41 Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Merlin Press, 2009 [1969]), 159–73.

42 David Hatch, “Media Ownership: Do Media Conglomerates Have Too Much Power?” CQ Researcher 13, no. 35 (2003): 856–7.

43 Patricia Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (New York, NY, and London, UK: The Guilford Press, 1999), 61–79. Common Cause, The Fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned (Washington, D.C.: Common Cause Educational Fund, 2005), 5.

44 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest; Hatch, “Media Ownership,” 859.

45 Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 127–39; Barrow, Critical Theories of the State, 55.

46 See, for example, Dennis Wharton, “Ness a Lock for FCC,” Variety, March 15, 1994, https://variety.com/1994/biz/news/ness-a-lock-for-fcc-119257/.

47 Drutman, Business of America is Lobbying, 182 (Figure 8.7), 184 (Figure 8.8).

48 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, 41–42.

49 Ibid., 39. See also McChesney, Digital Disconnect.

50 William J. Clinton, “Remarks on Signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996,” UC-Santa Barbara American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-signing-the-telecommunications-act-1996 (accessed February 8, 1996).

51 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, 49.

52 Ibid., 42; Common Cause, “Fallout from the Telecommunications Act.”

53 Martin Gilens and Crag Hertzman, “Corporate Ownership and News Bias: Newspaper Coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act,” Journal of Politics 62, no. 2 (2000): 369–86.

54 This is based on a corpus drawn from my full-text search of online archives for news articles, briefs, editorials and op-eds that included both “telecommunications” and “legislation.”

55 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, 1–2.

56 Neil Hickey, “Money Lust: How Pressure for Profit is Perverting Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review 37, no. 2 (1998): 28–36; Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977): 1–27.

57 This is based on my search for questions including “media,” “broadcast,” “television,” “TV,” “radio” or “stations”, and “ownership” or “own.” The database is available online at: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/.

58 Jacob Hacker, “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (2004): 243–60.

59 McChesney, Political Economy of Media.

60 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, 89–94; McChesney, Problem of the Media; Common Cause, “Fallout from the Telecommunications Act”; Hatch, “Media Ownership.” On resource effects, see Mettler and Soss, “Consequences of Public Policy,” 60.

61 Common Cause, “Fallout from the Telecommunications Act,” 3–4.

62 These data are compiled by the nonpartisan, nonprofit research group OpenSecrets, and are available online at: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries and https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/. Only the health and finance/insurance/real estate sectors have spent more on lobbying.

63 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, 69.

64 Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In,” 151.

65 Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, p. 69; John Eggerton, “NAB Says FCC Should Wrap Up Overdue 2018 Regulatory Review ASAP,” Broadcasting & Cable, February 22, 2023, https://www.nexttv.com/news/nab-says-fcc-should-wrap-up-overdue-2018-regulatory-review-asap.

66 Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In,” 153.

67 Holleman et al., “Sales Effort.”

68 Pickard, Democracy Without Journalism? Path-dependent legacies from establishment of the weak U.S. public broadcasting system may have contributed to this policy drift. See William Hoynes, Public Television for Sale: Media, the Market, and the Public Sphere (San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1994).

69 Des Freedman, “Media Policy Silences: The Hidden Face of Communications Decision Making,” International Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 3 (2010): 344–61.

70 Khachaturian, “Bringing What State Back In?” 717.

71 Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In,” 150.

72 Russell Newman and Ben Scott, “The Fight for the Future of Media,” in The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century, eds. Robert W. McChesney, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott (New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 35; Christina Dunbar-Hester, “‘Free the Spectrum!’ Activist Encounters with Old and New Media Technology,” New Media & Society 11: nos. 1–2 (2009): 222–23; McChesney, Problem of the Media, 256–58.

73 Appropriations legislation enacted in 2006 enabled the cap on network TV national audience reach to increase from thirty-five percent to thirty-nine percent, rather than the forty-five percent preferred by the FCC and corporate media lobbies. After years of court challenges and episodic legislative pushback, in 2017 the FCC prevailed in eliminating newspaper-broadcast station cross-ownership rules. Congressional Research Service, “Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Media Ownership Rules,” R45338, June 1, 2021, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45338.pdf. See also: McChesney, Problem of the Media, 258–95.

74 Christopher Ali, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 56–59.

75 For potential historical counter-examples, see, for example: Stole, Advertising on Trial, Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy. Democratic tendencies may yet manifest in future periods marked by broader, more intense and more focused popular mobilization, if media reform movement currents were to become deeply integrated into multi-issue progressive forces congealed in a third political party or (more likely) a strong Democratic Party bloc. In this scenario, a critical mass of movement-backed elected officials might bring significant legislative successes and major power in bureaucratic oversight and administrative appointments, thereby providing leverage to democratize corners of the state apparatus that are crucial to media policy.

76 Drutman, Business of America is Lobbying, 181–86.

77 Jessop, “Bringing the State Back In,” 151.

78 Mettler and Soss, “Consequences of Public Policy,” 60.

79 Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2010); Katerina Eva Matsa and Kirsten Worden, “Local Newspapers Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, May 26, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/local-newspapers/; Lawrence K. Grossman, “The Death of Radio Reporting: Will TV Be Next?” Columbia Journalism Review 37, no. 3 (1998): 61–62; Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, “Understanding the Rise of Talk Radio,” PS: Political Science and Politics 44, no. 4 (2011): 762–67.

80 Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Katerina Eva Matsa, “Buying Spree Brings More Local TV Stations to Fewer Big Companies,” Pew Research Center, May 11, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/11/buying-spree-brings-more-local-tv-stations-to-fewer-big-companies/.

81 Sarah Sobieraj and Jeffrey M. Berry, “From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News,” Political Communication 28, no. 1 (2011): 19–41; Nikki Usher, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021); Priyanjana Bengani, “As Election Looms, a Network of Mysterious ‘Pink Slime’ Local News Outlets Nearly Triples in Size,” Columbia Journalism Review, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/as-election-looms-a-network-of-mysterious-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-nearly-triples-in-size.php (accessed August 4, 2020); Gregory J. Martin and Joshua McCrain, “Local News and National Politics,” American Political Science Review 113, no. 2 (2019): 372–84; Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018); Lauren Feldman, Edward W. Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz, “Climate on Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC,” International Journal of Press/Politics 17, no. 1 (2012): 3–31; Mark Hertsgaard and Andrew McCormick, “The World is Burning, but the Political Press Insists on its Horserace,” Columbia Journalism Review, https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/presidential-debate-horserace-biden-trump.php (accessed October 28, 2020); Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless, News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

82 John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 10 (2011): 1–30.

83 McChesney, Digital Disconnect; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2019).